SEO UPDATES

Pay Per Click consultants and agencies are holding their collective breath…

Yahoo! Is going to use Google for paid search…to see how it’s going to go. According to Marketwatch.com - Microsoft and it’s increasingly aggressive acquisition deal is freaking out at Yahoo! using Google paid search. The head of legal is saying that will bring 90% of all paid search to Google, a possible antitrust problem.

But the ads Yahoo is planning on using will only total 3% of all paid search, and they’re only doing it temporarily.

This is fantastic for those of us doing PPC, because Yahoo needs to find a better way to run the backend of their PPC campaigns.

The Yahoo backend is clunky and confusing, while Google’s MyClientCenter is sleek and easy to use. Yahoo could take many lessons from Google and I hope they do during this possible try-before-you-buy time. If Yahoo could incorporate some of the Google strategies of backend usage as well as not making it darn near impossible to work with Yahoo if you haven’t already spent $1,000 with them would make my life as a PPC consultant so much easier.

Yahoo has the right idea. If your system is broken, look at someone else’s (preferably someone that has paid search in the bag, like Google does) and use the knowledge to improve your own systems.

Or just merge with Google PPC so those of us running campaigns don’t have to spend three times as much time to run the same campaign we do over at Google. It’s just silly.

RSS Micro is the latest in search engines created to search RSS. This one is a rss feed search engine created with ajax. It searches not only blogs but news feeds as well and from what I could see it was pretty easy to use.

While there a few bugs, it’s still in beta after all it is starting out a head about the others with some key features such as the ability to subscribe to a blog right from the search results. Your search history is also saved via cookies.

If you have a website, should you be obsessed with search engine optimization (seo)? Well, it depends. I do feel that all websites should be as optimized as you can get them but their is no reason to have a meltdown over it.

Google changes how it ranks every few months and many hold their breath wondering what will happen to how they rank in the search engines depending on the phrase they use. Some can see their business and amount of visitors daily lower significantly after such an update to Google’s system.

The thing about that is, if your only way of getting customer’s or just visitors to your website is through search engines, then depending on what your site or blog is about, your going to lose in the long run. Things change, you can’t expect to put all your eggs in one basket. If you are not a business and only make money on the side of your site then considering doing link trades.

Trading links helps you with your ranking plus gets you knew visitors who wouldn’t have been searching for your site. Also there are lots of places online in which you can get advertising on individual websites at no great cost.

Stoney deGeyter of ISEdb.com says that the relatively new online market place is really “still coming into its own,” and that “the old brick and mortars might have some wisdom to dispense [regarding] how to run a successful business”:

Achieving top search engine placement is the B&M (brick and mortar) equivalent of choosing your store’s location. We’ve all heard it, when setting up your store, location is everything: location, location, location. Unlike B&Ms, however, websites can’t just buy or rent their location on the organic search results. When you set up a B&M, you can choose your location based on the demographics of the area and your customer. You obviously want to go where your target audience is most likely to shop.

This is similar to the process of keyword research and selection. You want to choose the keywords that your target audience is using in the search results, in hopes that you can achieve the top search engine rankings for those phrases. Unlike B&Ms however, knowing where your target demographic shops (or searches), you can’t just sign a lease agreement and start getting foot traffic. Search engine optimization is a long-term process that requires you to finesse and “earn” your way into the prime locations, i.e. top rankings for your targeted keyword phrases.

But is placement enough? Not quite.

The next logical step when it comes to growing a business is… Advertising.

Even businesses with a prime location are seen advertising on the TV, radio, billboards and newspapers. You might even notice some that advertise in other stores with coupons and discount fliers. All this is aimed for the goal of bringing in even more traffic than the location itself allows. And it’s good business sense that many online business owners forget about.

[...]

Web based businesses can … employ pay per click (PPC) marketing campaigns to achieve visibility in those high-traffic keyword targeted areas. Also, similarly to off-line businesses, you can establish strategic partnerships with other online businesses. This can be done via customer referral deals, affiliate partnerships or giving each other a plug in the form of a quality link.

In short, “don’t rely completely on your location. Especially newer businesses because 1) you won’t get those top positions for many months, and 2) top positions can be lost overnight with a dramatic algorithm change (even if just temporarily).”

David Pasternack has an interesting article on SEO Today about Yahoo Subscription Search and its implications for the way we all search, and do search engine optimization.

Currently in beta, Subscription Search will give people the ability to search subscription sites such as the Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, the New England Journal of Medicine and TheStreet.com directly through Yahoo. It’s like a website search page is built into your browser. People who subscribe to those sites can search for articles they are interested in and automatically be directed to the information they want. People without subscriptions will still be barred from viewing those sites.

Pasternack argues that this development will spark a trend where people will be searching fewer and fewer websites (instead of the billions tracked by Google) to find the specific information they want.

Instead of marking the end of SEO, though, he says this will make optimization even more important. When your site is up against two or three competing sites as the only results a searcher sees, you’ll want your SEO to be perfect so they choose your site.

But while organic search might have lost some of its charm, SEO has gained a tremendous amount of importance for the top-brand companies. Because, if subscription search catches on as well as it does, then two things will happen: 1) people will increasingly use the search engines for what is, in effect, site-search; and 2) you’ll be competing with your closest competitors in Search more fiercely than ever.

Which really means that 3) you should start looking at the search engines as your pre-site sitemap. And, in a SERP that only shows results from three websites - yours and those of your two top competitors - you’ll want to do everything you can to make sure that you win in that SERP.

So your SEO needs to be absolutely, positively stellar. Not only in terms of getting positioning for your site, but in terms of being able to describe and present exactly the right landing page to the searcher who’s looking for what happens to be on your site. Because if you don’t do a stellar job of that, that doesn’t mean that your competition won’t.

It will be intersting to see if things really go this way.

As you can see the PR update has begun, This I think was the longest wait for PageRank update. Jagger, Big Daddy … all was confusing the webmasters from last few months. Even Matt Cutts did not mention anything about it on his blog. I noticed updates on few datacenters … 216.239.53.104 , 66.102.7.99, 66.102.7.147, 66.102.7.105 … This ofcourse will be a great news for the webmasters.
I have collected a few tools to check pagerank in various ways, various data centers. Please do note that different tools listed use different datacenters so the result may vary and I suggest you check once in google toolbar . It is normal that it shows different pagerank in different datacenters, In the past it’s usually lasted a few days and then they all gave out the same PR.

PageRank Check
http://www.sr-ultimate.com/pagerank
http://www.seologs.com/pr-check/pagerank-dc.html
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/pagerank-lookup/
Various Datacanter Check
http://www.inlock.com/
http://www.mcdar.net/Q-Check/datatool.asp
http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_checker

I know that many bloggers give the whole Page Rank affair more importance than it probably really has, but for whoever might be interested in knowing that, Matt Cutts gives on his blog more info about updates, and announces that said PR will very likely be updated soon:

Just to give you a heads-up, I think a new set of backlinks (and possibly PageRank) will probably be visible relatively soon; I’m guessing within the next few days. I still expect some flux after that though, just to let you know.

It seems that the word is currently touring the blogosphere, and coming in from more than just one source. In any case, it won’t harm to check our page ranks in the upcoming week, just to see if this was true or not.

Sorry there haven’t been too many updates around here lately… If you’d like to try your hand at blogging on Search Engine / SEO news, we’d love to have ya join us here on the Niner Niner network and SEO Updates.

You can signup to write for Niner Niner over on the Signup Page, beta password is: niner

Now, onto some AdSense news from a few days ago (in case ya misted it!):

JenSense broke the story of Google’s own AdSense page being hijacked in the SERPS of Google.

This is just silly. Someone thinks they can hijacks a Google page get away with it? LOL. Not.

Jen sez:

When you decide to hijack a site in the Google serps, it makes sense to do one that will benefit you in some way, while not raising yourself too high on the search engine’s radar. So, it obviously makes perfect sense to go and hijack the Google AdSense site

This is the best though. Kevin at All-In-One-Business.com replies back in the comments:

I want to thank JenSense and others for posting this thread.

Thanks for the comment Air Charter. I just got off the phone with two different tech writers explaining why I would have a meta redirect on my site.

It isn’t an attempt to profit from either Google’s page rank or some cloaked affiliate link.

I am no hijacker. In fact, I’m not sure how I could in any way benefit from this link.

The simple fact is this: I write and syndicate articles all over the web. I used to put into those articles direct links to sites I was talking about.

A couple years ago I had a problem when I had written and syndicated several articles about GoTo.com when they changed their name to Overture. There were dozens of websites to notify and ask them to update the links in my articles.

So I decided to begin using meta refresh redirects rather than listing the URL’s directly. I can then keep the links current in all the articles I write.

Hopefully Google will look at this and decide to make some changes so this won’t occur. It’s hard to believe I got a number 1 listing without trying.

Can anyone these days ever just admit when they’ve f’d up and come clean? Feh.

Andi Baio broke another webspam story recently, this time on Syndic8 hosting articles on their various sub-domains.

An update on the article reads:

May 6, 2005: Philipp Lenssen reports that Syndic8.com was removed from Google’s index entirely. By e-mail, a Google engineer also confirmed that the Google AdSense account for Syndic8’s ad affiliate was terminated.

I agree with Aaron Wall in the comments, who states that it’s Google’s responsibility to make sure people aren’t cheating AdSense. If their quality control for the AdSense program was more rigorous, this wouldn’t be an issue. They’re passively supporting this practice by allowing people to profit off it.

Ouch! That’s pretty harsh, but I guess they had to make a lesson out of someone for all this “webspam” + AdSense that’s floating around out there.

Google, currently the most popular search system, is today rolling out its new advertising program. The L.A. Times reports that Google intends to capitalize on the $9.6 billion online ads generated last year with its new program:

Advertisers will be able to search Google’s database for websites relating to specific subjects, then bid on how much they’re willing to pay to place either text or display ads on each site. The program builds on a limited test of graphical ads launched on partners’ websites late last year.

For some, such as TheStreet.com’s Kevin Kelleher, Google’s move signals a return to a past marketing model–at least, in appearance. This is because

The plans would further detach many of the ads Google sells from its search engine, expanding the company’s role of broker to advertisers seeking to place ads on third-party Web sites.

Google, in other words, is looking more and more like an advertising company than, as they oft described themselves, an information dispenser. In doing so, they are stepping up their challenge of Yahoo!’s, AOL’s, and MSN’s plans to dominate the online advertising space. Yet Google may endanger their own lead as a search system by changing Internet users’ perception of the company. Today, Google is highly respected for the simplicity of its product(s) and for seemingly adhering to the philosophy they have promulgated, “Don’t be evil.” By focusing on advertising, however, Google may be viewed as more concerned with the bottom dollar than the quality of its information-dispensing products. Google may not quite be evil yet, but with their expanding forays into new adverising programs they’re certainly less angelic than they’ve heretofore presented themselves.